


waterfalls

by sinistra_blache



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Angst, Arthur has a job to do and dammit he didn't mean for that to be a pun, Dom is unhinged and so is Mal, Hand Jobs, Made For Each Other, Multi, Shower Sex, True Love, and I mean that in every possible way, they deserve each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:00:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25881736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistra_blache/pseuds/sinistra_blache
Summary: When they dreamed, they were a team. Mal was a force to be reckoned with and Dom swirled worlds around her, both of them confusing targets and getting anything they wanted.Everything and anything.
Relationships: Arthur/Dom Cobb, Dom Cobb/Mal Cobb
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

Dom fell in love with Mal before they started working together. He loved her from the moment he saw her from across the room, interrupting her father’s lectures. He loved the way she knew that he was watching her, he loved the way she said his full name, _Dominick_ , like it was a joke only she got. He liked it when she teased him like that. She thought that he was arrogant because he was and she liked that about him. 

He loved her before she loved him, but she did eventually fall in love with him, and as soon as she did they became unstoppable. 

If he started a project then Mal was there with him. When he got recruited for dream-share research, she insisted on being involved. No-one argued with her. It was a gift of hers. 

When they dreamed, they were a team. Mal was a force to be reckoned with and Dom swirled worlds around her, both of them confusing targets and getting anything they wanted from them. Information, names, money. Everything and anything. 

The sex was never better. 

The rush of their jobs, of their own competence, of the danger, it was as though every single day was lived on the edge of a knife. Sometimes, layers of skin were peeled back as they danced over the blade. Sometimes, they cared about the danger. Only sometimes. 

Her nails would drag down his scalp, his face, his neck. Dom would close his eyes and imagine her cutting him open, razor cuts into his jugular, trusting Mal with everything he was and losing himself in it. 

She returned the trust. Put herself in his hands. Made him feel like a giant, and more powerful than he had any right to be. Hands around her throat until both of them reached breathless orgasm. Bruises that blossomed over her hips only to be kissed away when they made it back to the bed. 

Power, danger, control. Freedom and forgiveness. Forever, all in one moment, with Mal. 

She would drag him into the shower, laughing, and tell him not to fall over. Demand that he hold her up, press her against the tiles. Make her gasp, she’d instruct, and Dom would oblige. He never fought, never wanted to fight. Never went against her wishes because they were his own. The shower water, always flowing and always too hot, too much, against his back while she gasped in his ear. 

She laughed, breathy and private, during sex. Those laughs lived inside of Dom’s chest. Planted themselves like seeds, the roots taking hold and spreading to the rest of him. 

When Mal died, those laughs didn’t leave. The feeling of nails down his neck followed him when he dozed. Bruises on his own skin seemed like kisses from beyond, grave dirt pressed against him and staining everything he had left. 

For a while after she died, Dom took cold showers. Any heat he felt seemed stolen and he had no way to give it back.


	2. Chapter 2

The rush of the job never went away even with Mal gone. The pain of losing his kids, of Dom’s life falling apart, wasn’t stark enough to stop the adrenaline spike, the inevitable flush of skin, the Pavlovian swell of need. 

It was another fact of life. Just another part of the job. Something to note and then dismiss for another time. 

Facts, notes, and different parts of the job were things that never escaped Arthur’s notice, however.

It only happened twice and both times were done mostly in silence, but Dom knew that they were classified in Arthur’s mind as _necessary_. He wasn’t complaining. It was good to be dragged into a shower again. It was familiar to him, taking off his clothes and turning the water on too hot, even if the skin he touched wasn’t the skin he was used to feeling. 

Not that Arthur wasn’t good. Not that. It’s just—

His hands weren’t soft enough, and he smelled like a still smoking 9mm casing. Dom wasn’t worried about the water burning his skin because everything in his head was screaming at him that he couldn’t touch Arthur, he’d burn his hands, the trigger was too recently pulled.

But Dom’s blood was too close to his skin after the job, and Arthur somehow knew to press his body against the tile, and he didn’t complain when Dom dug his fingers into his skin hard enough to leave a bruise. Bruises that wouldn’t be kissed away. The thought nearly pulled Dom out of his reverie, nearly brought him crashing back into reality, but Arthur didn’t let him. 

Dom was a task to complete but, oh, Arthur was so good at clearing his to-do lists. 

Arthur’s hands were quick, precise in ways that were like Mal’s. His wrists were thin enough to be held against the tiles, too. Dom held one hand, wouldn’t let Arthur pull away and leave, while Arthur proved that he was good at this as well as everything else. 

There was always a part of Dom that felt like Arthur was too good, too informed. If he believed in such things then it would be easy to suspect that Arthur was a mind-reader, but Dom knew the truth; Arthur just did his research. He did his research better than anyone else in the business. He got dirt and information about people that their own family were in the dark about, things that their mistresses didn’t know, things that their therapists didn’t know. Arthur had files on everyone in his mind. Miles and miles of files. Facts and figures, secrets and slander. 

Dom knew that Arthur had a file on him. 

He didn’t know just how detailed it got. He didn’t know how Arthur could have known that he liked it tight, agonizing, and fast. Mal would laugh, tell Dom that it was not a race, but it was never about that. He liked to be on the edge of everything, on the edge of going too quickly, of holding too tight, too dry, too much. He wanted to be on the edge of pleasure. 

Arthur, somehow, knew that. Dom didn’t ask how. He didn’t want to know.

The orgasm was pulled out of him, hooked and twisted from him, and Dom came against Arthur’s skin. He shook. He never shook with Mal. He always felt like the world was shaking around them but he never shook. He trembled, against Arthur, while he pulled once and then twice more, just to be sure that Dom had nothing more to give. 

He moved Dom’s hand away from him when he moved an unsteady hand to take Arthur, to return the favor. He simply requested to share the shower and told Dom that he could stay if he wanted. He said that he didn’t mind the company. Dom stayed and, after twenty seconds under the spray, he remembered to release his hold on Arthur’s wrist. 

Arthur got dressed, left plane tickets on the dresser beside the bed, and got out of the room. Task completed. Box; checked. 

Dom tried to feel insulted by that but he couldn’t. He felt better. He didn’t tell Arthur that. They didn’t talk about it at all, not even after the second time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is the reason for the whole fic and it basically came about because I was told not to do this   
> :D


	3. Chapter 3

Dom goes straight to their house after the Fischer job. Miles drives. He talks while he drives, too, but Dom doesn’t hear him. He doesn’t listen. He can’t. He’s spent years away from his children, and again, and again. The man he is in his head is ancient, full of dust and lost time, and he feels like he’s about to crumble apart. 

Parts of him falling away as they walk through the house, looking almost exactly like it does in Cobb’s memories. He mistrusts it instantly. His mind flaking and floating away in a breeze, he pulls out the totem and he prepares himself. 

After everything in Limbo with Mal, after the search for Saito, after he forgot and remembered the team all over again, the last parting shot of his insanity would be to watch that damned top spin and spin and spin forever. 

He hears them, his children, and nothing else matters. He knows more than any spinning top could tell him; he could never have conjured the perfection of James’ excitement and the cold heartbreak of Philippa’s suspicious eyes. Dom abandons the top. He knows his world is real, now, when he sees their faces. When he hears their voices. 

There’s only one other thing Dom knows as surely. 

Later, when the house is quiet, Dom has to face that knowledge. There’s no escape because everything has the lingering mark of Mal on it. Nearly everything in the house, the art and the furniture and the rugs and the _damn plates_ , were chosen by Mal. Dom had a veto, and he used it when it mattered, but everything was her choice. Ultimately, always her choice. 

Everything she ever did was her choice, he tries to tell himself. He touches the edge of a chair and forces the velvet cover against its own grain. Mal was a force of nature, but an independent one. 

Dom is used to everything he tells himself. He’s whispered these things in the dark over and over again until the words became part of him, until it became an evening prayer. Mal made her choices. A silent plea in the middle of the night. All her actions were as lucid as they could be. Dom made choices, he wasn’t the one with that power. All he had was a veto. 

The smell of old flowers, a perfume that Mal had years ago, persists in the air somehow even with her long gone, even with years between her death and Dom’s return. It’s the smell that ruins Dom’s calm. He had forgotten that scent so completely that it hadn’t even made it isn’t his dreams of Mal. It shatters through his prayers and pleas and stories that he tells himself. 

The smell is floral and sour and it follows Dom to the bathroom. It follows him into the shower. The steam makes it stronger, cruelly, and the scent fills his lungs until he feels like he’s about to burst open from the intrusion. He’s too full of the remains of Mal to take full breaths, and too frantic to think clearly. He steps into the spray and the rush of heat set at exactly the right temperature for Mal in the mornings rips the air from him. 

His tears get lost in the chaos of the shower. It’s the first time he’s cried like this since that night, at the window, at the hotel.

He doesn’t know when he collapses but he knows it takes him at least forty minutes to drag himself up from the puddles pooling around his legs. He knows that he uses all the hot water. He knows that he’s thankful for one of the choices that Mal made, the choice to ensure their walls are thick enough not to wake the children with any noise. He knows, while he sobs, that he wishes that the scent would leave him and that he could drown under the spray. He knows that he doesn’t mean those thoughts and that now, more than ever before, suicide terrifies him.

He knows that he doesn’t bother to get dressed when he gets out of the shower. 

He knows that he falls asleep cold and wet and alone, surrounded by the scent of flowers from the grave, and damning his own name. Cursing his last veto.

Knowing, once and for all, what he is.

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe this fic could be summarised as "just shower thoughts".


End file.
